Before Now – The Great Highway Raceway
I bought my first car in 1987 for $400. I hadn’t felt a need for an automobile until the opportunity to pick up a ramshackle 1963 Buick Electra came my way. Being a west-side kid, I naturally took my new ride out to the Great Highway to see how fast it could go.
This was not today’s Great Highway. Before the 1980s, south of Lincoln Way meant six lanes of no stoplights, curbs or crosswalks. I think only a couple of dim yellow cobra lampposts stood on the whole stretch to Sloat Boulevard. Driving at night in the fog on the cracked pavement, sand blowing across the road, my Electra topped 100 mph around Pacheco Street. It rattled like a box of marbles the whole time, but I was satisfied.
An old beach car at the Great Highway. Image courtesy of Joseph Frank Mitchell.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Great Highway was a popular place for teens to drag race, even if the winner often met a waiting SFPD squad car just past the finish line at Lincoln Way or Sloat Boulevard. Racing began to fade away after the Golden Gate National Recreation Area took over Ocean Beach in the 1970s. When the Great Highway received a shoreline makeover in the early 1990s with a median strip, walking paths, stoplights and crosswalks, dragging for pink slips was gone for good. At least I hope it’s gone, now that I am a sober man of middle years who regrets the reckless ways of his youth.
Mid-century teenagers didn’t invent speeding on the Great Highway. Joy riders on the scenic road were a recognized nuisance from the early 1900s. In 1912, the city’s Police Commission responded by forming a 30-officer motorcycle squad just to patrol Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach. The officers invented some daring tactics to deal with speeders, as this old newsreel demonstrates:
Drive safe this holiday season and watch out for any unmanned police motorcycles flying over the dunes.
Trivia answer: Last column we asked, “What heavyweight boxing champion trained at the Seal Rock House on the Great Highway in 1910?” Jack Johnson, the trailblazing African-American heavyweight, worked out at the Seal Rock House for his bout against the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Johnson won.
New trivia question: What organization was famous for a huge New Year’s Day run on Ocean Beach every year?
Woody LaBounty is the founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco, and the author of “Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb.”
Its is sad that narrow minded cowards killed off one of Americas greatest spontaneous training grounds for future Engineers and trades people. Look at the whiney hipster vandals who may know how to run super fast computer devices, but cant figure out how to hold a wrench. Look at the thugs who live through the satisfaction of intimidation of other people to mask their own ignorance. Look at the ugly graffitti sprayed all over private and public propery by poorly raised, neglected, bored deliquents who have no concept of the pride of ownership or craftsmanship. Drag racing and Hot Rodding gave an outlet for generations of young people to learn how to get a job and work for money to buy cars and parts to be able to go a little faster than the next guy.
The amount of studying and research that goes into the design of a home built hot rod cannont be imagined by most modern college degree seeking persons because it doesn’t happen in an established institution. A lifetime of intense learning of physics, dynamics, structural systems, and the illusive artform of being able to personally combine all if these subjects and countless more into a machine which could surpass the best that Detroit sold at the dealerships is the ultimate fruit of a car lovers labour. The Hot Rod, Custom, Lowrider, Racecar or Motorcycle is Americas greatest art form. Consider: the music of a properly tuned engine, the sight of hand worked shapes as sculpture and the use of color as thought out as the finest painters. Beyond that there are the smells-a true car lovers perfume, some others may not agree-, and an element that music or theatre cannot match is the feeling of acceleration, deceleration, and the G-forces of hard cornering. Beyond Jazz or any other artform, American home built automobiles shaped the world we live in today. Literally worldwide impact which came from the garages and driveways of Americas WW-II veterans who led the design of the automotive industry and gave inspiration for personal freedom of travel and expression. Not simply a shiney device bought from the store to get to work and the shopping mall. Drag racing as it happened spontaneously at places like the Great Highway gave a reason to live and not just exist. Reality, not virtuality, and individuality at its best. Sure there were problems, some people got hurt, but for the few who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, generations of people benefitted without ever knowing where the technological minds got the spark to push the limits, and live.
Wow. Maybe the PD sacrificed a couple of bikes to make an intimidating (and inadvertentlly hilarious!) newsreel, but If that actually was all-in-a-day’s work, those officers sure earned their pay!
I am going to have to disagree. The speeder will pay a ticket, but the motorcycle will have nightmares forever.
Was it the Olympic Club?